As plain Tom’s, who, quite content,
Stayed at home upon the farm.
Herbert wore a broadcloth coat,
Thomas wore the homespun gray;
Herbert on display did dote,
Thomas labored every day.
These lines have clung to my memory during many changing years, and I quote them now with undimmed admiration as almost the best example of “good bad stuff” that our literature possesses. And if the lines compel our regard, what must be our respect for the genius which could extract sixteen ten-dollar poems from the one primitive idea of the two rustic brothers?
The bard who penned these deathless stanzas has progressed with the times, and now writes many a poem for the Century and Scribner’s, but I never see his name in one of the great monthlies without thinking of the days when he used to sit in the outer office of the Ledger, with half a dozen of his contemporaries, wondering whether he would get a ten-dollar bill or his rejected poem when Mr. Bonner came out to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Some of my readers may wonder what became of all the poetry that was rejected by Mr. Bonner, and to these I would reply that it was seldom, indeed, that any literary matter—either in prose or in verse—was allowed to go to waste. The market was not as large then as it is now, and a serious poem could “make the rounds” in a very short time. If it failed as a serious effort it was an easy matter for a practical poet to add to it what was called a “comic snapper,” by virtue of which it could be offered to Puck or Wild Oats.